A gentle voice with exacting intelligence  mourns England, its living unemployed and its generation of  tall, dead men:   Where are the monstrous men with chests like barrels and moustaches like the wings of eagles who strode across my childhood's gaze twenty or thirty years ago? Buried, I suppose, in the FlandersThe Road to Wigan Pier by George Orwell read by Richard Green

Venice is an old small town of old small sins. The Venice, that is, of Commissario Guido Brunetti, who may want no more of life than to read Xenophon and wait for his wife to come home from the Rialto with soft shell crabs. It is a Venice ofFriends in High Places by Donna Leon::Anna Fields

  '...This grand vehicle was a color not seen in nature... metallic, shimmering kind of not-chartreuse, not-gold, not-silver, not-mauve with just a hint of not-maroon....' Thinks Kelp, not-thinking, not-talking to himself in a kind of not-Bronx, not-Queens, not-Staten Island, in-your-front-lawn five-borough accent while looking for a car to steal in Long TermThe Road to Ruin by Donald E. Westlake Read by William Dufris

Imagine a Cobbled Court Quilt Shop. A Blue Bean Bakery. A For the Love of Lavender Herbal Boutique. Farms, handiwork, handicraft, prudent, helpful, hardware-toting neighbors, dainty small town gossip, happy volunteers, lavender soap: the fantasmatic drift of post-Madoff sub-urban female regret. What does a pretty pacified community look like whenThreading the Needle by Marie Bostwick read by Hilary Huber, Bernadette Dunne

What a wonderful Upper West Side between Broadway and Central Park West in the 70s voice to listen to .... when you're on a boat to Kabul or Talibaq. Close your eyes and you can see the doormen, the yellow taxis, the short, balding, murderous psychoanalysts, walking their dogs betweenHope to Die by Lawrence Block

An adulterous wife, a cracked small town doctor, a crooked partner, and a handful of gun-nuts, rednecks and vets are trapped inside this book like 5 men and 4 cowboy hats in a trailor. Third Degree by Greg Iles read by David Collacci

There is always a boy and a dog (....and a psychopath) After all, you're inside the mind of Dean Koontz , and its the loneliest night in the world, and you've just seen the saddest thing on earth, and there are monsters in the backyard, and youONE DOOR AWAY FROM HEAVEN by DEAN KOONTZ read by ANNE TWOMEY 

The relentless decomposition of the Oznard family has left Andrew in the position of so many young Englishmen, who had, for the first time in centuries, to feed themselves. Young Andrew had thus determined from an early age that he was for England and more specifically, that England was forThe Tailor of Panama read by John Le Carre read by Le Carre

Again, we have Washington with its burials and its laudations betrayals become elegy -- where the ones praising the dead are also their executioners. A Roman tradition carried brightly on by moral gamesmen, whose empires are supported by three rhetorical questions: Is it ethical for men in power, men entrusted byA House Divided by Mike Lawson read by Joe Barrett

Elizabeth Moon The Speed of Dark read by Grover Gardner Pattern recognition is the theme of this second millenium. Knowledge is pattern recognition. Love is pattern recognition. Beauty is pattern recognition. Those who can recognize patterns get to recognize more patterns. Hi, ho. Class struggle. Now, lets get flush. A few smallElizabeth Moon The Speed of Dark read by Grover Gardner

Firm writing, good characters, heavy social issues, but no story. Meet Ruth. A divorced mother who teaches sex education at a public high school is more or less forced to teach abstinence according to a rosy if delusional Christian fundamentalist agenda. Meet Tim: divorced, saved and reformed byThe Abstinence Teacher by Tom Perrotta read by Campbell Scott

Two mothers. Iris, mother of the bride, is pushy, ambitious, Jewish, overpresent, and proud of her Red Hook genealogy, which can be traced back to the Battle of the Bulge. But Iris is not exactly a local. Yes, every summer Iris comes back to the oceanfront Queen Anne house,Red Hook Road by Ayelet Waldman read by Kimberly Farr

Ever since Tracy Ullmann quipped that being in your early 50s was a wonderful time for most actresses, I've been watching for a script. Here it is. The next Meryl Streep movie: what better role for an over 50 actress than that of a politician's wife? That's right, one ofFly Away Home by Jennifer Weiner read by Judith Light

The salad dressing was the only one Partain ever used: "9 parts olive oil, one part red wine vinegar, vinegar soaked salt, ground black pepper and more garlic than most people liked." Write this down. Ross Thomas' recipes are rare, legendary and authoritative. As are his stories, his characters, andAh, Treachery! by Ross Thomas read by Frank Muller

Has anyone else noticed a spectacular and embarrassing  silliness among the old guard of East Coast scribblers? As though they were trying to write comic books, and couldn't figure out how to convert text into images? Gone are the wry, dry, street talk, the inside cracks of persons, cities, institutions.Capture by Robert Tanenbaum read by Charles Leggett